Women's parties have a unique and important role to play in the representation of women and women's issues and interests. They are neither a new nor a rare phenomenon and have emerged in a variety of contexts across time and space. And yet we know relatively little about them. This article argues that women's parties matter and that the study of women's parties matters. We contend that women's parties constitute a discrete party family; while there is a diverse range of women's parties, they can be viewed as a coherent group with similar origins, ideology, and naming patterns. This article offers the first research framework for the comparative study of women's parties. Building our knowledge of women's parties, we argue, is important for those interested in gender and politics, particularly those concerned with the representation of women's issues and interests.

The U.K. Women's Equality Party (WEP) was established in 2015 to “bring about change by winning—support, votes and seats.” It has thus far recruited tens of thousands of members and run candidates in European, national, devolved, and local elections. This article provides one of the first empirical analyses of this new actor in U.K. politics. Adopting a feminist institutionalist lens, we examine the extent to which WEP “does things differently” by looking at its discourse, formal party rules, and informal ways of doing things “on the ground.” Drawing on a set of semistructured interviews, observations of local and national party meetings, and document analysis, we argue that while WEP has to some extent tried to set up alternative participatory structures and new “ways of working,” it has also at times fallen back on more traditional, centralized, and hierarchical modes of party organizing, as well as informal practices that are more typically associated with male-dominated parties.